


My Ribs Open and Close Like Doors

by Mechanic_Dove



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Allura and Coran make no appearence, Everyone/Everyone - Freeform, Hopeful Ending, Hurt/Comfort, Lance is the glue holding this team together, Minor Character Death, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, everyone is fucked up, the Voltron team is sad but are also a family
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-17
Updated: 2017-02-17
Packaged: 2018-09-25 01:27:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,975
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9796286
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mechanic_Dove/pseuds/Mechanic_Dove
Summary: They fight a hopeless war. Lance tries to make sure his friends are okay.





	

It’s a shift that takes place overtime. Perhaps if one had the desperation to keep their eyes on it they would see, but it was as gradual as the movement of the sun, dawn to dusk. 

They stopped trying to keep up with earth time after the fourth year in a war that they were beginning to realize couldn’t be won. They couldn’t hold the worlds they liberated. The limited resources of a resistance versus the might of an empire that had run for over ten thousand years was too much. They would free a people and lose them not long after. Planets began rejecting their help, hearing of what had happened. Any friend of a paladin was as good as dead after the Galra regained control

This much had been shown when Shay’s execution was broadcasted over the air. Galra propaganda stations cheering over the death of a known rebel and threat to the crown.

All Keith saw was an innocent girl, beaten and bloodied tortured while the crowd cheered. Six times Lance tried to get Hunk to stop watching. He begged and pleaded, but the yellow paladin could not be moved, tears streaming down his face as he held a tiny Balmeran crystal. A Pendant she’d given him on one of his journey’s back to her Balmera. Its soft glow flickered in his grip and Keith was sure it would never been as bright as it had before the execution.

Hunk didn’t speak for weeks, barely ate except for the few occasions that Lance could convince him to have just a little. Keith’s chest felt tight for months after, seeing the way Hunk’s colors had greyed, the way he only smiled when he thought you were looking.

After Shay, after seeing the approval of the empire, more executions took place.

The Galra were vicious, and any weakness they found in Voltron would be poked at like a bruise until purple spread over your arm, and even your bones ached from the pressure. 

The next weakness they found was Pidge’s

A three week siege took place over one of the moons of Qriopol, Galra teeth glinting while they sent the ship transmission after transmission of Matt Holt begging for mercy. A “gift” of Sam Holt’s head in a box given to them to bait them there. 

Pidge had gone down to the bay, ready to give up herself and her lion to find Shiro already doing it.

The siege was won.

Pidge saved her brother but not her father.

Weeks later Keith found himself talking to her about it, talking about Matt

She questioned if she’d even really saved him by forcing him to live. If by giving him back his sister, still small and annoying in a way only siblings could be, as a seasoned warrior, with more scars than anyone her age should have and more wit and more ghosts that she hid by pretending to work on code when she couldn’t sleep. When the nightmares and pain and death got to her.

She wondered out loud if she’d saved someone beyond repair. Someone broken by the Galra. It had been at least a year, maybe two, and Matt Holt still wouldn’t speak to Shiro, still began breaking down if he got too close, still refused to call him anything aside from Champion. They worked together in the dark of her room sometimes. Matt, when given something logical and complex, would be as much of his old self as he probably ever would be again.

Pidge made a point to bring him scientific samples, puzzles, alien languages to read. 

Matt was fluent in Galran, and within a year of arriving on the ship, fluent in Altean and the Spanish Lance taught him

Shiro, for all his credit, still tried talking to Matt sometimes. Recalling days at the garrison that he remembered less and less as life on earth felt more like a dream, and telling stories of the planets they visited to try to capture some interest.

Sometimes Matt would listen if Shiro didn’t sit too close. Sometimes he couldn’t handle to be in the same room, eyes locked on The Arm, too lost in his own head to hear what was said.

It was those times Shiro looked saddest. He had nightmares, they all did, and showed up every morning with the biggest bags under his eyes. After enough fear and anger and something else deep down he’d once tried to tear off his Galra arm, sick of having a past of violence and murder be part of him. Sick of the Galra taunting him even still with things he could only remember in bits and pieces. 

Shiro never showed it to the rest of them, Keith knew, and it was only because the two of them had been so close before the disappearance that he knew at all. Shiro broke down like he did everything else. With measured dignity and logic. He put the team before himself and more than once, mid-crisis Keith had watched him switch to Autopilot. Stuffing down his emotions by shutting them off, one order after another coming out quick and nearly monotone. Doing what needed to be done and detaching himself from it as far as he could. These were the worst. Sometimes Shiro would stay on autopilot long after the battle, unsure how to come back to himself. To flick that switch back on and be Shiro again. Keith worried constantly that someday they may not get him back. All the pressure and the flashbacks, and Matt’s fear, and the unwinnable war would crush him, and they’d be left only with the aftermath.

Sometimes though, even with the daily executions of old friends, the shadows cast over Matt and Shiro, the saturation of color lifted from the seven people he’d grown to recognize as a family the worst of it was Lance. 

More than the others, more than Pidge eating and sleeping less, more than Hunk re-watching Shay’s execution every couple days, more than Shiro’s flashbacks or Matt’s panic attacks, Lance was subtle. It was only if one watched over time that they could see the impact on him.

Keith knew Hunk had. If not for the yellow paladin pointing it out, he may have never noticed. Lance was slowly greying from his old vibrant blue. He joked less, if at all, and while he still flirted with everything sentient and vaguely cute it lacked any conviction behind it. He would pull back after one or two phrases, like it was some kind of quota to fill. Without it some normalcy would be lost. 

Keith may treat Lance like he wasn’t very bright, but he knew better than to believe it was true. Lance saw what was going on around him, to his friends, and he tried to keep everyone together. If he kept everyone else together, maybe he wouldn’t fall apart himself. Training until he collapsed, desperate to do anything and everything he could to be useful to a group he didn’t believe he could really help. Insecurity would eat him from the inside and maybe, Keith though, Lance did his best to make sure his friends were okay to prove he could do something right in the group.

Keith noticed that Lance would stop Hunk from being alone for too long, would drag him from the dark of his room and into the kitchen. While he never seemed eager to start, once Hunk got into the swing of cooking his mood almost always seemed to lift. Specifically if Lance stuck around, just to talk, or sing as he often did when given the chance. 

Lance would slap Pidge’s laptop shut and tell her either to check on Matt or drag her to the kitchen with Hunk, the three of them finding a chance to joke and laugh and with Hunk cooking Lance could make sure Pidge ate. 

Lance struggled with helping Matt and Shiro, he had, after all, only known Matt for a year or so and had only ever been able to help lift his mood by teaching him Spanish. He tended to send Pidge after him, knowing as they all did that she was the only one who could make Matt smile anymore. The Blue and green paladins started trying to mend Matt’s relationship with Shiro, slowly, easily. With gloves on, and Shiro’s arm covered, he could get considerably closer to Matt, and with time (lots and lots of time) let Shiro touch him without flinching. 

Keith stepped up where he knew Lance couldn’t. He made it his personal point to take care of Shiro. This usually involved the latter’s vices (the largest of which being Apple Juice, which trust him, was incredibly hard to come by in the depth of space but they made do). And someone to talk to after one of his more violent nightmares. Keith had stayed up with him night after night when he needed to, to make sure Shiro knew he was safe. That he wasn’t alone

It wasn’t for a while after he’d noticed Lance’s attempts to keep some semblance of hope in the group that he realized that maybe Lance was doing it to him too.

The blue paladin would find him in the training room in the depth of the night, and offer to train with him. Or invite him to the pool when he felt that maybe Keith needed a break. A stream of banter going between them throughout everything they did together. It released something in him, something easy and normal and comforting. He felt like he could really be just Keith with Lance. Just a kid, thrown into a war far too early and covered in scars that he shouldn’t have. He may not have even noticed he was being taken care of if Lance hadn’t invited him to the kitchen on one of the occasions he pulled Hunk and Pidge away from their minds.

Keith brought Shiro, and Shiro managed to get Matt to come with too.

The team was all together in a room without a single word of war spoken, which, Keith realized with a little shock, wasn’t something that happened often anymore. Lance sang something in Spanish which apparently was fucking hilarious because Matt was actually laughing. Hunk was pretty much glowing, given the chance to cook a real Altean recipe that Pidge and Matt took turns translating for him and cracking more jokes than he had in a long time.

Shiro was leaning against the wall, smiling wide at his team in the few and far in between moments of peace and happiness they could find in a war that never ended. 

Keith found himself dragged into some argument or another over Star Wars, Lance apparently having the gall to believe that Obi-Wan Kenobi would have made a “much cooler Sith than Anakin Whiny-baby Skywalker” Which frankly, he just couldn’t stand around listening to without letting the blue paladin know just how wrong he was

It was much later, after a heated debate about Star Wars (in which Lance compared himself to Han Solo no less than seven times), an Altean film that they all made up dialogue for after Matt and Pidge gave up translating, and Shiro laughing so hard some of the sort-of Apple juice they’d found coming out of his nose that he found he was really honestly happy. 

Their war was hopeless, he knew it, and they all did. But they kept fighting. For the galaxy and for each other. Maybe they would find a way to win someday but for Keith seeing all of his friends smiling genuinely was more than he could ever ask for.

They all had their own shadows, curling around their ankles, licking upward when they seemed weak-

But they had each other too.


End file.
